Reclaiming Sobriety & Thriving in Life: Ken Cox on Breaking Free from Addiction

In this powerful and deeply moving episode of Empowered Within, I sit down with entrepreneur, author, and sobriety coach Ken Cox, who has dedicated his life to helping others break free from addiction and reclaim their power.

Ken’s latest book, Reclaim Sobriety: 12 Rounds of Sobriety, is shaking up the recovery world with an approach that goes beyond traditional methods. We dive into:
✨ What sobriety truly means in 2025
✨ The mindset shifts that create lasting change
✨ Breaking generational cycles of addiction
✨ Why traditional recovery programs don’t work for everyone
✨ How to build a powerful mental toolbox for success

Ken shares his raw, unfiltered journey—growing up surrounded by addiction, battling his own demons, and ultimately turning his life around to become a beacon of hope for others. His story is proof that transformation is possible, no matter where you start.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, this is an episode you don’t want to miss! 🎧✨

📖 Grab Ken’s book Reclaim Sobriety 👉 ReclaimSobriety.com
💡 Learn more about Ken 👉 KenCox.com

🌟 Subscribe, rate, and share to spread the empowerment!

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Transcript

0:06

Welcome to Empowered Within, a soul quenching, transformational podcast that will set your soul on fire through candid and inspiring conversations. Leading experts, celebrities, healers, and I share our journeys of how we've overcome challenges to living an empowered life from within. I'm your host, Jennifer Pilates. Welcome to another episode of Empowered Within.

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:34

Hi there and welcome to the show. I am so excited to have with us today's guest, Ken Cox. And for one reason, his background, when you get to see this, oh my gosh. Craving some Sherbert, we both have some obsession with pinks, which is pretty cool. But let me tell you a little bit about Ken. Ken is an entrepreneur, author, and sobriety coach who has dedicated his life to helping others overcome addiction through innovative methods beyond traditional approaches. His latest book, Reclaim Sobriety, 12 Rounds of Sobriety, draws from his personal experiences and offers a unique blend of strategies that empower individuals to achieve lasting sobriety. Ken's approach emphasizes personal responsibility, empowerment, and a holistic view of recovery, helping individuals to not only stay sober, but to thrive in their lives. Welcome to the show, Ken. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Oh, of course. I'm so happy to have you. I know it's been a while. It's been, uh, long overdue for us to have our moment together. So here we are towards the end of the year. I think this is a great time to talk about sobriety during quite a stressful month and going into what some people feel stressful into the new year and a lot of pressure. I wanted to ask you something though, because I feel over the years, things have gotten a little twisted and curved when we talk about sobriety and what it means. And I would really like you to help our audience to understand what does sobriety mean to you in 2024? Wow. Okay. Sobriety to me is just being able to live a life without, any specific third party or third thing in your life, right? So, when you're in addiction, like in active addiction, you almost, You know, everybody says the same thing. I'm going to quit tomorrow. I'm gonna quit next week after the holidays, all of those things. But whenever it's time to actually do it, you turn into like a zombie almost and you're acting on things that, you know, you're conscious of saying you shouldn't be doing this. But for some reason, your body is just going through the motions. It's stopping at the gas station, stopping at the bar, stopping at all those places. So it's removing that from your life. And then just being happy in everyday life, I think is just so important. And the living a life of recovery or always being in this, always an addict kind of mindset. Just put always kept me in this mindset of misery. Like I'm always going to be fighting this thing, which is true, but I think there's a lot of mindset shift work and mindset work that you can do. They get you to a place where you can truly live a happy, healthy life without this constant. nagging of fear and uncertainty and doubt in your head that I'm going to fail again or something along those lines. Right. What a great explanation. Thank you. I think it's just so important to just start with that right away. So people like we're all on the same page because some people will say, well, I'm sober or they'll call it California sober, you know? So it's good to know where we stand here. And the California sober thing. You know, some people have problems with certain things, right? And alcoholism or addiction is when you're not able to control it any longer. Right. So for me and alcohol, I can't ever do it again because I know that if I try it just once, even casually on Christmas morning or, you know, some egg nog or a brandy at the fire at dinnertime would be. Potentially catastrophic for me because I know that's a particular substance, it loses my consciousness and something else has control over me. That I, I'm obviously not the one in control, right? So take me back to your journey. How did it start and what got you on your path to sobriety? Yeah. So, my start is wildly early, birth, You know, born homeless. My mom was in a women's shelter, for unwed mothers. It was what they would have called it in the seventies. Right. That's what she right. Yeah. She, uh, you know, I left there and moved into a bar. She worked at a bar and we lived in a bar for my early ages. And then we were, when she met my father, my stepfather, he was a baker at the bakery across the street from the bar. And he sat there every night. So he was an alcoholic. So the journey for, with the relationship with alcohol starts for me at two and three years old. Can he go get me a beer? Can I open it? Can I have a sip? That kind of situation was just, you know, and then by, three and five years old kind of stumbled around and the older guys laughing and giggling about it, all the way up seven years old was when they put me in, I got in and started getting in trouble. They started putting me in a therapy at seven. I got in a lot of trouble at 13. They, then I was my first time in AA, never was able to successfully not have alcohol as a daily part of my life. I would go three, four months, something would happen and then right back into it. Not until I turned 30. I was 39 or 40 somewhere in there. I don't know the exact dates. I could go back and probably find them. I was diagnosed with liver disease, alcohol related liver disease, and my doctor gave me two years. So, that's when it became time to really get serious about it. And that started, you know, I'll be 50 in May. So, and it's been a struggle, you know, the first several years were a big struggle, lots of relapses, lots of failure. Um, you know, even with the guys of, you know, you're going to die, was still wildly challenging. It would lead to, you know, the traditional paths led me to constant relapses, constant anger, constant, not. Feeling good about myself. And until I started looking at different approaches and maybe not even different approaches, just framed differently, um, that I start really making some big changes. And the book reclaimed sobriety. Where I think it, it fills two, two really big gaps and two very, very wonderful programs. Smart recovery. I love smart recovery. I think it's a great program, but they don't, they by no means promote, um, moderation, but they accept moderation. Right. And that's something that's going to work for me. Uh, it took me a long time to figure that out and a, this whole concept of giving it over to somebody else, never. Never sat right to me. regardless of whoever's religious beliefs or anything, I believe that I have to be empowered to, to carve my own path and do my own thing and. I think that mindset of that, it's, that it's not me just leads me back to this relapse moment all the time. It's this constant thing. And, I was tired, very tired of having panic attacks, driving past the gas station or walking into the liquor aisle at the grocery store and freezing. So, I had to take a different approach. Wow. Well, I commend you on that. And there's so much, there's so many nuggets that I want to start with. And one, Holy mackerel. Let's dive back to the 1970s. All I heard were like bells going off when you're talking about Oh, go get me a beer. Go grab me a glass of wine that was such a seventies thing. That was such a seventies thing to like also change the channel. Right. While you're up, grab me a beer. Right. Explain just the mindset of the dynamics of how that sets up a child for possibly going down a not great road. Okay. so, you know, a little more insight to my childhood. it was obviously a bit rough and tumble the neighborhood that I grew up in. There was literally, a gentlemen's two gentlemen's club within walking distance. By the age of, you know, seven, eight years old, I could, sneak out and wipe the windows and peek in at that. So, for me, it's what made you a man. Like, uh, you know, drink a beer, puts hair on your chest, you know, all of those things where this is what men do. They work a day, they get off, they sit on the driveway, they open the garage door, they might start a bonfire and a couple neighbors come over and whoever's driveway you're at. We there until we drink them out of beer that night. Everybody passes out and goes to bed. And next night, another garage door opens and that's where you're at. So that was my life. And I associated, not just alcohol with being a man, but with the more you can drink and if you can stay up longer than all the other guys, then you're the. Then you're the strongest man. You're the toughest man. And it's just a weird, weird mindset. It was a weird mindset, but this is so 1970s. I feel like I should go put on plaid pants. Absolutely. So that's just what it was. And then, after that, it became part of who I was like. Nobody in my life even had met me not drinking like nobody, I can remember, being like 17 or 18 years old and, I'd already been arrested multiple times and, I've been through AA and all these things that my mother would still say, well, Kenny doesn't drink, uh, you know, and she was just dumped on it and it was just always drunk. I was Vodka and Kool Aid and, going to in my thermos in fourth grade, right? Oh my gosh We used to put alcohol in hairspray bottles in high school and no one questions spraying hairspray into your mouth Yeah, crazy crazy Yeah, look at what we've been through my gosh. What I love about your story is that you talk about breaking the mold. Why traditional recovery programs don't work for everybody. And I think that's so important because, like you said, nothing is a one size fits all, but I really feel like you've hit on some nuggets that are so important for people. And I'm hoping that you can dive a little deeper into that. Yeah, those two things are the keystones for me in the whole thing. Moderation had to be taken off the plate and AA says no moderation, right? But that program didn't work for me because of this concept of. Letting go of yourself. And, I was not, uh, spirituality has always been something that's nagging at me. I've never been a religious man. today I'd say I'm pretty spiritual. For a long time I was anti all of that, right. It was just stay away from me. I don't want to think about it. I just want to. You know, get through this biological life the best way that I can. But now it, it plays a big part for me. In the gratitude piece at minimum, right? Having gratitude for life is a bit of big part for me, but I couldn't give it up to this unknowing being or whatever the, whatever they're trying to tell you to do. I couldn't comprehend it even. So it just didn't work for me. And that being such a cornerstone. Of that program just turned me off to it. Right. It was like, oh, this is all just bogus steps go through and blah, blah, blah. so what I truly believe that this game is, and I don't think this. And just addiction. I think it in every part is you need a big toolbox in life and no set of tools are going to work the same for every person. And shoot, sometimes the same tool given to you, just, just given to you by somebody else works better because it might be the same tool, but it was framed a different way for you. And. So that's what I try to do is just give permission to people to try things. If it works for you, it works. It's not wrong. You know, the, I hear all the time, people like, well, you can't do it that way, or you have to do it this way, or this is the only way that it works. And that's just such bull. It doesn't, you know, we're all different. We all have. obscene amounts of variables behind us. And, so I just think we need a big toolbox and when things come up, have the ability to pull out the right tool or try a tool and throw it back and try another one and keep trying tools until, you know, you at least get past that, that moment in life. I think that's excellent advice. May I ask in your belief system, do you believe that addiction, whether it's alcoholism or anything else, whether that is a disease or whether that is plain and simple, just an addiction. I think it's both, anybody that has wanted to not do something with every bit of their being, but for some reason they keep doing the action. They can't, it's so uncomprehendable now to look back and watch myself literally saying you shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be doing this all the way up until the moment of doing it. And then just saying, Oh, screw it. I don't care anymore. Is such a bizarre thing that this chemical has this thing over you and going through withdrawals a few times. I mean, there's definitely. a physical component to the addiction with alcohol and opioids. I've been fortunate enough that I've only had to go through alcohol withdrawals a handful of times and I had to go through, the Xanax withdrawals, which were pretty bad as well. So there's definitely, there's medical stuff there, right? I'm not a doctor, so I don't know, um, you know, disease You know, all that stuff. But once you pass that it's mindset and I think it's a lack of self love. And I think it's that part of the how I did all this part of my research was I went through a bunch of coaching programs and I became a coach in a lot of different ways. And I did a lot of studying and neurodivergency and neurotransmission and high flow coaching. I've got my high flow coaching certificate. Is, you know, just you've created an environment in your brain that just has so many dopamine receptors and not filling those dopamine receptors is painful, it hurts, right, and your body will take over and fill those dopamine receptors somehow, if you can't get control of it. And that's what I truly believe it is. I think that was a really good explanation. You know, as you're saying, it's a little bit of everything just based on a chemical reaction within the body. It just, absolutely. What do you feel have been your biggest challenges along your road to sobriety? My biggest challenge is, I'll talk about today, right? Cause there's challenges throughout the whole project. I am wildly confident in my sobriety. At the moment, right? I've now been through, every possible scenario in life that you can deal with. I've had loss and all those things. And alcohol doesn't even percolate in my mind in those moments. So, I think I'm well past that, but, so most difficult time for in the process to get to sobriety, the big hump for me was pause post acute withdrawal syndrome. I think if you're in that, if you've been diagnosed with pause. Reclaim sobriety is an amazing book for you. I think there's a ton of tools in there to help you get through that specific part of life. If you, if you have to go through it, it's tough blasts. For me, it was about eight months. According to the doctors, it can be a couple of months. It could be a couple of weeks. It can be a couple of years. So that one's really, really challenging. But today it's my relationships with the people that are still in my life that were very close to me. Some of them have, you know, still a little bit of denial of parts of the relationship. The most challenging ones are my wife and my daughter and dealing with the trauma that I created for them and their lives, regardless of how much better their lives were than mine. I created trauma in their lives and that's really hard. You know, I can see why people just pull the rip cord and start a whole new life and get away from all of that. But, those relationships are important to me and it's worth the work to get, you know, over that. So, just because the alcohol is gone and that problem is gone doesn't mean there wasn't any other problems. You're probably, probably using that for, to overcome them. And, communicating to them in a way that doesn't blame them for your drinking, but helps them understand part of the reasons you were doing it potentially is, is a, it's a landmine of communication issues, that it persists, absolutely. I resonate a lot. Based on how I grew up in the household I was in. So I totally hear what you're saying. I couldn't not ask then what are some of the blessings that have come out of your sobriety? Oh, everything. Absolutely everything. So, you know, through, through this process and for me, One of the therapies that I think was probably detrimental in my recovery was EMDR therapy, which is imidazole desensitization. And I don't know if it's that or the sobriety or what it is, but, before sobriety, before I could stand up and not have alcohol as this literal, You know, every, you know, on a good day, I could go five or 10 minutes without something in my head, like clicking. Now I go days, weeks, months, unless I'm doing these podcasts. Oh, stop now. Come on. I was able to, find gratitude for life and I didn't have it before. I didn't care. I did not. There was not an, an ounce of my body that cared if I woke up the next day or not, it just didn't matter to me at all. Like this was just the thing that I was, that I was doing. And, I didn't care about my life. And today I care, I mean, Every single thing I could think of is just a blessing. I mean, we're sitting here where I don't even know what state you're in. You might not even be an American. We're talking and having this really cool conversation about how we grew up and finding similarities. That's amazing. The sun comes out and the moon's out. And, you know, all of those things are just. I was able to find joy for life and the very fundamentals of what life brings to you. And I never, I didn't ever have that. So, you know, it's the closest thing to being born again that I could think of. Oh, that's a great way to align that. I like that, which brings you to a whole other place from being not understanding a higher power, not wanting to deal with a higher power, just not resonating with it, to now saying those words. That's very powerful. Yes. Incredibly powerful. So you, not only, you have written a book. You've gone down all of these coachings, you're very successful in being an entrepreneur, which being an entrepreneur is very challenging in and of itself, let alone adding in, you know, walking your road to sobriety as well. How do you balance both? Because both are incredibly challenging. So entrepreneurship is just something that I, it's part of who I am and I'm balancing entrepreneurship and sobriety together or just all the different things? Is All the different things, right? Because we've got stress, we've got leadership coming in, we have, there's a lot that goes into both and how do you keep them copacetic so that you're not falling off your sobriety beautiful road? Yeah. Yeah. So I stay very busy. And I'll share a couple tricks on how I. And how I do that. So my, my, my days are just so much fun that I don't know. I mean, I wake up in the morning and I come to the data center and I work in the data center Monday through Friday, nine to five. And I absolutely love it. Right. It's, it's great. It's, I've got all these computers and I'm always solving problems and it, you know, it keeps me very active mentally. After that I leave and I go to our boxing school and I hang out with the kids. And I trained them for a couple of hours and me and my wife do that together. Most nights. And we get home about eight or nine o'clock and we hang out, we do dinner and play games and go to bed. So, you know, that's an average, that's just the total average day for me. On the weekends, we very big supporters of amateur boxing. We own St. Louis's largest boxing school. So we go to a lot of those events and we hang out, I get to talk to. You know, I'm, I'm going to a fight this weekend and Holyfield and Spinks are going to be there. Right. And, and I get to announce it. So it's like, I get to play with all these great things. And I talk about, Bashir in my book and he says, you know, act on your most passionate desires at all times with no expectation of the outcome. And I think that is just such a beautiful way to live. And I'm so fortunate to be able to have adopted that and you know, it feeds my family. So how Much luckier could I get? How cool this weekend sounds like so much fun. I want to come. It's a totally free event in St. Louis. So, yeah, it's for differently abled kids. So I have a, an autistic boy that's on our boxing team. And so this is an event for differently abled, kids to compete in the sport of boxing, which is just so much fun. That's incredible. Oh, that sounds so amazing and so heartfelt. I love that you're doing that. It's so much fun. Oh my gosh, yes, right? In your book, Reclaim Sobriety, 12 Rounds of Sobriety, you write it's not just a memoir, it's a guide for anyone looking to take control of their life, whether they're battling addiction, struggling in their career, or seeking to understand the dynamics of mental toughness. What is one thing that you would like readers to walk away with from your book? I think the biggest thing that they can walk away with. I believe that if you look within, that's where you'll find the answers. I truly believe that, and I hope that they walk away with that understanding. If they don't walk away with that understanding, they will walk away with some tools that a person has used that they can probably assimilate with, right? There's not too many drunken night stories that, that you have, that I don't have also, right. I've seen it all from births to deaths when I was drunk. So, I've been through all of it and, you know, I tried to assimilate as much as I can give the tools that I use for myself on my boxing team to change your mindset and, empower yourself to. to do the hard work. So I think the tools is what I want them to have or tool new tools that they don't have today. And it might just be one, just one stupid little turn that they got to make in their formula that brings them to join happiness. So, that's what I'm really just trying to share. Yeah, that's incredible. What piece of advice would you give to a listener who is currently struggling with the idea of sobriety so in my mind, that is a very long rope of struggling with sobriety, you know, from the very beginning to the end. I've never had. For AA, you have to acknowledge that you're an alcoholic. I never had that problem. I always knew I was an alcoholic. I celebrated it. I put it on a pedestal, right? It was my, it was one of the trophies that I had in life. So I had to break down that relationship with alcohol for myself. So if there's one thing that I want people to get is that if, if I can quit, anybody can quit, that's definitely true. I was, you know, I would fight you for my bottle. Happily, right? Not only would I fight you, I would try to get you to fight. I would try to get you to take it from me so I could fight you. That's just the kind of person that I was. And, it was my best friend, my everything in my life to me. And I had to completely sever that relationship. So I think it doesn't matter where you're at is understanding your relationship with the substance itself or the mindset that you have about that at those activities. and start changing that narrative. And if you can't change that narrative, I don't know that you have a possibility for success. If someone's ready to take the next step in sobriety, they've resonated with everything that you're saying today. What do you tell them to do? They need a step now. What do you tell them to do? Obviously, I'm going to say buy the book Proclaimed Sobriety. It's 99 cents for the e book. but get in a group. Get as fast as possible. Get in a group. Doesn't matter, which one it is. If it's AA and you can't stand the religious stuff, just try to, just try to bypass it. If you got a smart recovery group in your area, I highly recommend smart recovery groups. it's a huge game changer for me. I know they have them zoom meetings as well. I could never really get into those. And I also highly recommend recovery Dharma. There's a book, it's about Buddhism and suffering and, there's a life after suffering and understanding those things. Just start looking for help. It's out there. It is so out there. If you. Want help? It's out there for you. I'm not sure you have to look within to get there. I truly believe that. But I'm also not sure that you can do it out of community. It'd be very hard. I think it would be very, very hard to do without some kind of community. I would agree with that. So taking a full circle now, how is your health today? Great. Um, I mean, I still carry a few extra pounds, and that's okay. But, you know, I do I probably trained four or five hours of boxing classes a week. Not nearly as intense as I used to, but it's still a whole lot of fun. I have zero signs of liver damage at the moment. So, you know, it went from so ridiculous, after my diagnosis, liver disease, I was able to get nine months, 10, maybe a year without drinking. My liver panels were down, right? Way down, uh, below 40 and actually this is perfect, right? This is, this is where you need to be. And I convinced them to let me start drinking again. Right. This is one of my relapses. It's like, if you can do one or two a day, you know, one or two at dinner every once in a while, go ahead. Don't do more than three a week. You know, that turned into three a day, which turned into 20 a day. So I started. going to get blood work from a different panel every week to see how much I could drink for the week. Wow. And then that got me to my regular doctor where he was, he's like, Oh, something's, something's not right here. So he was doing blood work every quarter on me. But I was doing my own blood work every couple of weeks, to kind of manage my own blood counts and my liver counts, which is just horrible. Don't don't do that. It's bad. But now I've not, I do my liver counts once a year with my chest x rays and everything else. And we're in good flying shape. There's no signs of liver disease at the time at this time. So that's amazing. Congratulations. And so that's possible. I mean, I was, my counts were in the nine hundreds and, at the thousands, it's not recoverable. So there's a point and check them, go to the doctor and check your liver if you drink every day. That's great advice. And so what has it been about 10 years now since you've had that diagnosis? Yeah, 10 years ago, I got the diagnosis, roughly about 10 years ago. The liver disease diagnosis, that was a couple, a couple of really, really rough years. Those first couple of years were very, very challenging. I lost. I lost one of my mentors during that time. I became the president of the company that I'm at now, which really, you know, a whole ton of new challenges that, that you think, you know, as a vice president, but you don't know until you're the president. Right. Right. Well, congratulations on your journey within. Your journey with your health, your mindset, your body, and coming into alignment, body, mind, and spirit. Thank you. Yeah, I thank you so much for your vulnerability and sharing your journey and all of the, the interesting details. Because being so candid, I feel is what people really need to hear and that's what they really resonate with. Absolutely. Thank you. it's not always easy, right? but as a coach, it's required and that I think that assimilation and knowing that, um, you know, other people have been where you're at is wildly important. Absolutely. So if I can be, if I've taken all the negatives, things that have happened because of that, if I can turn it into something positive. You know, that's something that I would, highly recommend anybody to do. That's been through a challenging time in their life. Right. Uh, absolutely. Share the story so other people can have it here and give them the tools that you used, right? This is our job now, as we age is to give tools to the younger generation and find, find new and creative ways that they can be, that they can accept them. Just having the tools. isn't enough, but having them in a format that's, that it's okay for them to accept them is really important. Yes. And we have a lot of knowledge coming from the 1970s. It was a really, gosh, you just like totally like took me so to so many different places. Oh my goodness. I appreciate it. Ken, will you share with our amazing community where they can best contact you and get in touch and grab a copy of your book? Yeah. If you want to learn more about me, the easiest way to do that is go to kencox. com, K E N C O B X. com. reclaim sobriety. com is the book where you can just look up reclaim sobriety on Amazon. It, it was the number one new release and multiple categories. The one that I'm most. excited about is teen addiction. It hit a pretty big popularity hit in there, which was not intended. But I couldn't be more excited about that as a teenager that went through addiction, you know, at that time, it, I'm just, I couldn't be more happy, about that if I can help a kid that's going through it. Yeah. That's incredibly powerful. I don't need to do anything else with my life. Congratulations on that. That's incredible. Well, as we close out the show today, Ken, what is one last piece of inspiration or perhaps advice that you'd like to leave with us? Piece of advice, you just get to work, right? Stop stalling, get to work. One of the best pieces of advice that somebody gave me and it wasn't a piece of advice. They told me, Ken, you're short to the point and somewhat abrasive. That's the approach I took in the book. And I think that's the approach that we need to take with ourselves when we're dealing with the hard, you know, hard truths about things. So get to work, and just don't beat around the bush. Got to do the work, that is great advice. And I think that's so important. We need to cut the fat out and just go right in for it. And that's what people need these days. Yes. Absolutely. Well, all of Ken's information will be over in the show notes at jenniferpilates. com. Ken thank you again so much for being here. this has been a joy and educational insights, road down memory lane, for good and interesting thoughts as well. Most importantly, I want to say so much for being here. Congratulations on the success of your book and congratulations on your success of now living a healthy, happy, empowered within life. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jennifer. I had a blast talking with you today. You're so welcome. Well, as we say, everyone, until next time, may you live an empowered life from within.

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